UW News: How an assistive-feeding robot went from picking up fruit salads to whole meals

Training a robot to feed people presents an array of challenges for researchers. Foods come in a nearly endless variety of shapes and states (liquid, solid, gelatinous), and each person has a unique set of needs and preferences. A team led by CREATE Ph.D. students Ethan K. Gordon and Amal Nanavati created a set of…

Community Partner Spotlight: PAVE

November 8, 2023 CREATE is pleased to work with PAVE (Partnerships for Action | Voices for Empowerment) to help guide our efforts and shape solutions around the needs and limitations of accessible technology. They’ve supported our grant applications, shared opportunities for participation in CREATE research projects with their community, and published CREATE research on the…

Off to the Park: A Geospatial Investigation of Adapted Ride-on Car Usage

November 7, 2023 Adapted ride-on cars (ROC) are an affordable, power mobility training tool for young children with disabilities. But weather and adequate drive space create barriers to families’ adoption of their ROC. CREATE Ph.D. student Mia E. Hoffman is the lead author on a paper that investigates the relationship between the built environment and…

UW News: Can AI help boost accessibility? CREATE researchers tested it for themselves

November 2, 2023 | UW News Generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, an AI-powered language tool, and Midjourney, an AI-powered image generator, can potentially assist people with various disabilities. They could summarize content, compose messages, or describe images. Yet they also regularly spout inaccuracies and fail at basic reasoning, perpetuating ableist biases. This year, seven CREATE researchers conducted…

UW News: A11yBoard accessible presentation software

October 30, 2023 | UW News A team led by CREATE researchers has created A11yBoard for Google Slides, a browser extension and phone or tablet app that allows blind users to navigate through complex slide layouts, objects, images, and text. Here, a user demonstrates the touchscreen interface. Team members Zhuohao (Jerry) Zhang, Jacob O. Wobbrock,…

Augmented Reality to Support Accessibility

October 25, 2023 RASSAR – Room Accessibility and Safety Scan in Augmented Reality – is a novel smartphone-based prototype for semi-automatically identifying, categorizing, and localizing indoor accessibility and safety issues. With RASSAR, the user holds out their phone and scans a space. The tool uses LiDAR and camera data, real-time machine learning, and AR to…

ASSETS 2023 Papers and Posters

October 4, 2023 As has become customary, CREATE faculty, students and alumni will have a large presence at the 2023 ASSETS Conference. It’ll be quiet on campus October 23-25 with these folks in New York. Papers and presentations How Do People with Limited Movement Personalize Upper-Body Gestures? Considerations for the Design of Personalized and Accessible…

Research at the Intersection of Race, Disability and Accessibility

October 13, 2023 What are the opportunities for research to engage the intersection of race and disability? What is the value of considering how constructs of race and disability work alongside each other within accessibility research studies? Two CREATE Ph.D. students have explored these questions and found little focus on this intersection within accessibility research….

CREATE’s Response to Proposed Update to Section 504 for Medical, Health

Updated November 30, 2023 The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office for Civil Rights published a proposed update to the HHS regulations implementing Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibits disability discrimination by recipients of federal funding. This is the first comprehensive update to the regulations since they were…

CREATE’s Response to Proposed Digital Accessibility Guidelines

October 4, 2023 CREATE has submitted a response, in collaboration with colleagues within the UW and at peer institutions, to the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) proposal for new digital accessibility guidelines for entities that receive federal funds (schools, universities, agencies, etc.). The DoJ proposal invited review of the proposed guidelines. The response commends the…

Virtual Traffic Stop App Aims to Ease Tensions, Aid Communication

October 2, 2023 The designers of the Virtual Traffic Stop app aim to ease tensions and prevent misunderstandings between drivers and law enforcement during traffic stops. For Hard-of-Hearing or Deaf drivers, the app can be used to communicate with law enforcement via chat during the video. Users can add family members and invite them to…

People with Disabilities are a Population with Health Disparities

September 29, 2023 In September 2023, the Director of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities announced the designation of people with disabilities as a population with health disparities. The designation is one of several steps National Institutes of Health (NIH) is taking to address health disparities faced by people with disabilities and…

Quarterly Seminar on Accessibility Research

The CREATE Accessibility Seminar, CSE 590w – Accessibility Research, brings students and faculty together to explore a variety of topics relating to accessibility and technology. In the Fall, we usually read a book together. Spring seminars are usually short research presentations, followed by discussion and critical evaluations. Course information Past topics

Your Review & Comments Wanted: Proposed Federal Accessibility Standards

August 11, 2023 A proposal for new digital accessibility guidelines for entities receiving federal funds was released for review by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) on August 4, 2023. Anyone affected by these guidelines has 60 days — through Tuesday, October 3, 2023 — to comment. The DOJ is still trying to decide exactly…

CREATE Open Source Projects Awarded at Web4All

July 6, 2023 CREATE researchers shone this spring at the 2023 Web4All 2023 conference that, in part, seeks to “make the internet more accessible to the more than one billion people who struggle to interact with digital content each day due to neurodivergence, disability or other impairments.” Two CREATE-funded open source projects won accolades. Best…

Welcome Mark Harniss, CREATE’s New Director for Education

June 13, 2023 CREATE is thrilled to have Mark Harniss as our new Director for Education. Harniss is an associate professor in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine and director of the University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities (UCEDD) and the Center for Technology and Disability. Until recently, he was the director of the Disability…

Deep Gratitude to Wobbrock, Ladner & Caspi

June 13, 2023 The CREATE community thanks three of our founding leaders for their energy and service in launching the center as we embark upon some transitions. “CREATE would not be where it is today without the vision, passion, and commitment that Jake, Richard, and Anat brought to their work leading the center,” says CREATE…

Codesigning Videoconferencing Tools for Small Groups with Mixed Hearing Status

June 12, 2023 CREATE students and faculty have published a new paper at CHI 2023, ‘Easier or Harder, Depending on Who the Hearing Person Is’: Codesigning Videoconferencing Tools for Small Groups with Mixed Hearing Status”. Led by Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) Ph.D. candidate Emma McDonnell and supported by CREATE, this work investigates how…

Grant Opportunity: Disability Inclusion

June 11, 2023 The U.S. Department of Labor has made available $2 million for the first year of a cooperative agreement for an employer-focused, disability policy development and technical assistance center. From the EARN announcement website: The purpose of this program is to identify and promote adoption of innovative and equitable evidence-based policy and practice solutions…